Decred (DCR)

Decred (DCR) Review – Crypto Coin Judge

What is Decred?

Officially launched in February 2016, Decred is an altcoin quite like Bitcoin. However, dissimilar to other altcoins, the prime focus of this crypto coin revolves around community input, open governance and sustainable financing and development.

The cryptocoin makes use of a hybridized consensus system that helps in creating a balance between users and miners, thus enabling the most powerful altcoin or crypto coin after Bitcoin.

It also takes advantage of a hybrid proof-of-work and proof-of-stake mining system so that a small group cannot take control of the flow of transactions or changes made to it, without the community’s consent.

The Decred Team

The Decreed team includes Jake Yocom-Piatt, the organizer of the project and CEO of the company, developers, who prefer working pseudo-anonymously simply to keep a low profile instead of worrying about their recognition. The team also has its presence on Discord, reddit, Telegram, along with other social media platforms.

What problems Decred solves?

When the originators of Decred, while working as Bitcoin developers, discovered Bitcoin’s governance issues, they looked back to the basics to create a cryptocurrency that could keep the positive aspects of Bitcoin and set up the governance model. As a result, it was brought about with the aim of solving the problems of blockchain governance.

It takes full advantage of a distinctive hybrid of proof-of-work (PoW) and proof-of-stake (PoS) mining so that the decision-making process can be decentralized.

The feature of governance model enables owners (stakeholders) to do voting on a specific agendas or proposals for the Decred blockchain. That may also be inclusive of decisions like whether the development team needs to start working on a specific feature or not, whether to do activation of the code of any pre-developed feature or not, or even what are the best ways to take advantage of the development subsidy.

Thus, the community can join hands to back up the creation of features for the future.

Up till now, its system of governance has been working exactly as designed and expected. Stakeholders have even given their votes if they want to see any change in the protocol, and as of now, the required updates too have been efficiently done with the help of the community.

As a result, the company is now looking forward to implementing features such as the Lightning Network earlier than other cryptocurrencies.

How Decred came into existence?

Jake Yocom-Piatt, who is not just the organizer of this project, but also its CEO, himself, reveals how this project came into existence.

The Decred Principles

Dissimilar to other currently available digital currencies, such as MaidSafeCoin, MonaCoin, NEM and etc, OmiseGo (OMG) Decred abides by certain pre-defined principles; mainly to make sure the technology is truly meant for the public benefit.

Some of the key principles that they abide by are as follows:

Free and Open-Source Software – It will be offering all of its software as free and open source-software.

Free Speech and Consideration- Its every potential and existing user can share and communicate his/her ideas and opinions with no fear of being censored. It considers all fact-based and reason-based constructive speech.

Multi-Stakeholder Inclusivity – Inclusivity signifies a multi-stakeholder system, and it shall maintain an active effort to embrace a different set of users and views. Though ideally the company should include everyone, it is bound to adhere to all pertinent bodies of law in the jurisdictions.

Incremental Privacy and Security – The company prioritizes and equalizes both security and privacy in order to avoid the implementations complexity. Besides, the company continues to implement additional privacy and security technology on an incremental and regular basis, both on-demand and proactively to counter possible attacks.

Fixed Finite Supply- It has decided to issue a limited number of coins, and this number will hardly ever have change.

As of now it has supplied up to 20,999,999.99800912 coins, in addition to a per-block subsidy that claims to adjust every 6,144 blocks by bringing down by a factor of 100/101.

Universal Fungibility –Being a store of value, it takes Universal fungibility very seriously, and promises to actively monitor attacks and resort to countermeasures as and when they are required.

How can you involve yourself with it?

If you want to involve yourself with its project, following three are the main ways that you can use to get interacted with:

The Wallet – You can use this to send and receive funds and also take part in Proof-of-Stake mining.

Proof-of-Work Mining – This feature takes advantage of the computing power for the transactions validation on the network and for the creation of new tokens.

Proof-of-Stake mining – The Company uses funds to do voting on major network development matters and validate transactions for rewards.

The new and novel cryptocurrency also allows you to use its Wallet to generate address so that you can easily send and receive funds. It takes just five minutes to clear funds of a transaction.

Thus, it is the quickest and easiest technology when it comes to interacting with a project.

How to Create Decred Wallet?

If you wish to create your own Wallet along with your own Address, simply go to their website’s link and open it, go to the “Download Wallet” link, click it and save the opened file to your computer.

When you have saved the file onto your computer, click on the file to run it, the process of Wallet installation will start, and the Wallet will start syncing, meaning that the process of blockchain downloading has going on.

If you want to skip it, just go to the “Skip” button and click it. This step of skipping will take you to a screen that will encompass end number of words to show.

When you reach the next screen, you are asked to make an entry of your seed word by word and thereafter decide to choose a passphrase to encrypt the wallet.

Now when you are all done with the process mentioned above, you will find out that your wallet is set up, and now you can get interacted with the Decred blockchain.

In order to obtain your wallet address, just hit a click on the “Receive” link and thus you’ll be provided with the address and a QR code for it. And from here starts your journey to generate extra addresses as and when needed.

How to Buy Decred?

Currently, you cannot buy it with “Fiat” currency as it is a new currency. But if you purchase some Bitcoin or Ethereum first you can easily buy it and swap these digital currencies on an exchange.

Below are mentioned some of the ways that you can use to acquire this coin.

The five basic ways are as follows:

Purchase it for BTC through an exchange

PoW mine for it

PoS mine for it (for this you must already have some Decred with you)

Contribute to it

Trade or sell services or goods with anybody who is having it.

Decred Mining

The most interesting and noteworthy point about the company is that it is both worth-mining and staking.

Mining in the cryptocurrency world relates to the process wherein the transactions are validated on its network and kept secure. It, in return for work, reward the miners with newly-created coins.

The company validates transactions through following two methods, such as Proof-of-work (PoW) and Proof-of-stake (PoS).

Method of Proof-of-work (PoW)

Under the method of Proof-of-work (PoW), transactions get grouped into blocks that PoW miners have to validate.

When the miners have validated a block, it becomes a fixed part of its network.

It is easier to become a miner; you need to dedicate spare computing resources to the network. In exchange, you will be rewarded with Decred.

For convenience and efficiency, you can choose to join mining pools.

The pools basically are the groups of miners who not only get to share the work, but split the reward, as well.

If you are smaller contributors, it is ideal to join a mining pool to get constant payouts for your work.

Method of Proof-of-stake mining (PoS)

On the contrary, under the method of Proof-of-stake mining (PoS), here you are required to dedicate little computing resources. Moreover, you can use its funds to buy voting tickets through the network.

In every block, you at random are allowed to choose only five tickets from the pool of live tickets to do voting on the validity of the earlier block.

In addition, PoS brings an additional layer of decentralization to this cryptocoin and enables users to do voting on the recommended network changes.

PoS Pools also ascertains you can use your tickets to do voting as and when they are called.

What challenges Decred may have to face?

Decred, irrespective of possessing the 27th largest crypto market cap, still looks to be an anomaly in the cryptocurrency arena as it is being surrounded by a very little hype.

While it has been more successful on development and sound engineering, the main challenge that it may have to face is first to garner more adoption and second to grow its community.

Moreover, it may not last long with only its superior governance model, because, according to some media reports, Ethereum is soon planning to implement an analogous PoS governance system, expected to be christened as Casper.

Of course, Decred and other self-governing cryptocurrencies may coexist, but it is tough to say who is going to rule over the major part of the market cap.

Let’s hope this newly-launched cryptcoin succeeds in its mission and stay for long.

Decred in the Press

Media has acknowledged this new cryptocoin as a leading cryptocurrency project. Some of the recently mentioned media bytes are as follows.

Some useful Links that will let you know more about Decred

Official Website

Official Blog

Forum

Github

Reddit

Slack

Documentation

Twitter

Bitcointalk Announcement

YouTube

Conclusion

Unlike other digital currencies such as BitShares (BTS), Cardano (ADA), Dent (DENT), and etc., Decred is the brainchild of the few Bitcoin developers who desired to come up with an absolutely decentralized cryptocurrency where certain people couldn’t influence others.

Where crypto coins like bitcoins and others allow miners to have and maintain a stronger level of power than users, the company applies more equal and fair system.

Apart from creating a more supportive and robust community by virtue of their values, the community is also free to become an essential part of Decred project as the latter is always open to evolve and ready to receive your suggestions from the developers who get rewarded with the monetary benefits. Decred, as a crypto coin, truly works great with sufficiently greater chance of potential growth in the long run.

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